How the battle over Kamala Harris' identity will shape next week's debate

For eight years, Donald Trump has dominated the American political landscape. But as he prepares for his first debate with Vice President Kamala Harris next week, the former president faces a rare moment when the spotlight will be far more on his opponent than on him.

The race over Harris' personality has become a central political battleground in the 2024 presidential election since she unexpectedly came to power as President Joe Biden's successor in July.

Voter sentiment toward Trump has hardened after a decade in the public spotlight. That sentiment has remained virtually frozen, even after impeachment, charges, a felony conviction, and an attempted murder. Harris' support, by comparison, has been volatile. Voters' opinion of the vice president has suddenly and significantly improved in the nearly seven weeks of her candidacy, strengthening her position against Trump.

Sign up for The New York Times newsletter The Morning

For Harris, Tuesday's debate is her best chance to cement those gains. For Trump, it's her best chance to undermine or reverse them.

For Trump, it will be his seventh time appearing in a presidential debate ahead of the general election – more than any other candidate in the modern era – and for Harris, it will be his debut. Strategists associated with both campaigns said that means there is little new to learn about him, but voters have a lot to learn about her.

“Voters chose Donald Trump in 2016 and didn't change their minds,” said Robert Blizzard, a veteran Republican pollster. “The difference is that voters have started to change their minds about Kamala Harris.”

The argument over who Harris is – and what she stands for – is already dominating the airwaves in key swing states. Of the roughly 325,000 television ad airings paid for by Trump, Harris and their top allies in the Super Political Action Committee since entering the race, about 95 percent of them have been about her, according to a New York Times analysis of AdImpact ad tracking data.

Trump's campaign has sought to brand Harris a “failed, weak, dangerous liberal” with a three-pronged attack, linking the vice president to the more unpopular aspects of the Biden-Harris record, particularly on immigration and the economy. Harris' campaign has portrayed her as a former prosecutor who fights hard on the border, who understands the needs of the middle class and who would offer the nation a fresh start even if her party already holds the White House.

A peculiarity of the tight election calendar gave Harris another advantage: The Democrats were able to use her convention to present her positively for four days, while the Republicans focused on their then-rival Biden at their earlier convention. The Democrats portrayed Harris as a candidate of change who could reclaim the traditional Republican terrain of patriotism and freedom and present abortion as a fundamental right.

In June, the Biden team hinted that the president was anticipating Trump's plans for the debates, saying he was only running for himself and his billionaire buddies. But Biden never fully followed through on that line of attack. Harris will have the opportunity to prove it on Tuesday.

Of the 84,937 ads the Trump campaign has aired since Harris's candidacy through midweek, Harris was featured prominently in all but 189 of them, according to AdImpact data. More than 90 percent of the ads Harris ran focused heavily on her biography, her agenda or both. The leading pro-Harris super PAC Future Forward has not run any purely anti-Trump ads since she began her candidacy.

The importance of a presidential debate watched by tens of millions of Americans became clear in June, when Biden's aimless and hesitant performance raised questions about his age and ultimately knocked him out of the race less than a month later.

Tuesday's debate in Philadelphia will be by far the longest unforeseen confrontation for Harris during her candidacy – a high-risk encounter with an opponent who places little value on decency.

The 90-minute debate, moderated by ABC News, will follow the same rules and format as the June debate between Trump and Biden, including muting microphones when it is not a candidate's turn to speak – a provision the Harris team had wanted to eliminate.

The Harris team had hoped to recreate a moment like the one in 2020, when her “I'm speaking” response to interruptions by former Vice President Mike Pence became one of the most memorable moments of that encounter.

The Trump team is desperate to dissuade Harris from her arguments, but Trump himself has struggled to find an effective anti-Harris message. In interviews and speeches, he has attacked Harris' character, her past, her ethnic identity and her changing positions on key issues.

“He tried to define her in a very un-Trump way, to no avail,” said Jennifer Holdsworth, a Democratic strategist. “First he tried to make her into Biden. Then he tried to make her into a liberal district attorney from San Francisco. He even tried the vile racism. He didn't land a single hit with her.”

The jump in Harris' popularity has been one of the most notable elements of her brief candidacy, going from a negative overall rating—in early July, the poll's average of 538 had her 17 percentage points less likely to like her than she did dislike her—to a nearly even approval/disapproval ratio.

Perhaps Trump's most pressing task is to ensure that Harris remains closely aligned with Biden in areas where Biden is unpopular. In Trump's most-aired TV ad to date, Harris touts “Bidenomics” three times, according to data from AdImpact, while also touting negative economic statistics about gasoline prices, rising inflation and high interest rates.

So far, Harris does not appear to be suffering the burden of voter dissatisfaction with the policies of the Biden-Harris administration. A Washington Post-ABC News poll last month found that only 11 percent of voters thought Harris had much influence on economic policy within the Biden administration, and 15 percent said the same on immigration – despite efforts by the Trump team to brand her a “border czar.”

“She has all the benefits and none of the downsides of being part of the government,” Blizzard said. “She doesn't blame herself for the perceived failings of the Biden administration.”

Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster who worked on the 2020 Biden campaign, said the Trump campaign was hamstrung by contradictory arguments when he called Harris ineffective and influential.

“You can't say she did nothing and still be the driving force behind Bidenomics,” Lake said. “You can't have it both ways.”

At an event in Arizona on Wednesday, Republican Senator JD Vance of Ohio, Trump's running mate, gave a taste of the balancing act of the Trump campaign message, calling Harris both a “radical” and a faux turncoat who is now leaning toward the center after a 2020 presidential primary that saw her move to the left.

“She wanted to defund the police. Now she says she doesn't want that. She wanted to ban fracking. Now she says she doesn't want that. She was the border czar who opened the American southern border. But now suddenly she says she believes in border security,” Vance said.

Vance added that he had joked to Trump that Harris might now show up wearing an oversized red tie since she was emulating Trump's program.

Both Trump and Harris' teams and their allies have spent heavily on television ads on immigration. One Trump ad listed various crimes committed by migrants and featured Harris when she was district attorney. “The victim's blood is on her hands,” the ad ends.

Harris' team has used her tenure as California's attorney general to burnish her reputation as a tough-on-crime fighter, calling her “the prosecutor of a border state” in a commercial.

Of course, debates are often as much about impressions as they are about substantive issues and about what voters think about a candidate's strengths and weaknesses, commitment and temperament.

Harris arrived in Pittsburgh on Thursday to spend several days intensively preparing for the debate, but she had begun planning the debate months earlier – before she was even a presidential candidate.

She assembled a debate team led by Karen Dunn, a veteran Democratic lawyer. Philippe Reines, who played Trump in Hillary Clinton's debate prep four years ago, was recruited as Vance's replacement when he was her expected debate opponent. Now Reines is taking on the role of Trump again.

In an appearance on CNN this year, Reines described himself as “a Daniel Day-Lewis guy,” meaning that as an actor he would embody his role. The pinned post at the top of his X-account is a mock debate from 2016 in which he attempted to hug Clinton while playing Trump.

“You want to see them confronted with everything,” Reines said on CNN, stressing the importance of preparing the candidate for all eventualities.

Trump tends to prepare for debates in a more ad hoc format, discussing ideas and lines of attack with his advisers and friends. Trump remains bitter about running against Harris, whom he has made clear he does not respect.

“He was very controlled in the Biden debate and benefited from it,” Lake said of Trump. “The risk is whether Trump can control himself.”

There's one final reason why Tuesday's debate could be especially important. So far, it's the only debate both sides have agreed to, although there are talks with NBC about another.

circa 2024 The New York Times Company